In Part 1 of this article Transition from Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing, you will have implemented the foundations of your strategy which may include creating valuable content, search engine optimization, content marketing, and much more and will now be prepared for implementation.
You've benchmarked your current inbound marketing capabilities; you've defined the best structure and inbound marketing strategies for the job moving forward and even worked out which resources you need to gather.
During that process, you probably realised just how important these first three preparatory stages are to implement a successful inbound strategy in the first place.
1.Change your processes to support your transition to inbound marketing
Change is never an easy thing for a company to adopt. Not only because it seems like a risky endeavour, but also because your employees become comfortable arriving at work each morning and carrying out their regular duties.
Duties which, up until now at least, seem to have worked quite well. And, as we pointed out before, it’s this resistance to adopting an inbound marketing approach that can result in companies closing down, whether they’re small privately owned businesses or household name brands.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad. Some things will work as catalysts to the change even if others will work as inhibitors.
The head of research firm Altimeter, Brian Solis, produced an excellent graphic used in a blog post titled New Research: Technology Should Not Lead Digital Transformation that details the factors working both for and against your company.
Use the diagram to review what might benefit and what might hinder your company in the adoption of inbound. By making a list of these things, you know which strengths you can play towards and which weaknesses you’ll need to bolster during the transition.
2. Managing change for inbound transformation
Inbound marketing focuses on providing content for your target audience in the platforms they spent most of their time in. Whether it is social media, Google... If you haven't been doing that, you will need to change your processes. The change process presents its own challenges, so how do we manage them effectively?
To understand, we must look to a man born in the 1890s called Kurt Zadek Lewin. He was a German-American psychologist and a pioneer for social and organisational psychology research that’s still used in the field today.
This particular piece of his work is called Dynamic Change Theory and is adopted by many modern organisations for various shifts in business strategy.
According to Lewin, the change between two dynamic states (in this case, the change between a non-inbound and an inbound marketing system), must be broken down into three individual phases:
- Unfreeze: A climate of education, training and motivation of participants in the change must be created to unlock the present dynamic from its current position. You need to get people mentally and practically prepared for the change.
- Move: Once the first step is done, it’s important to move quickly to the new methods of working to reinforce the change. That means only announcing everything when you’re ready to make the move so people are expecting the change.
- Refreeze: Reinforce the system once it’s in place, locking staff members into the new inbound marketing modus operandi of your company.
By following this concrete foundation, you’re infinitely more likely to make a successful inbound transition that stops people falling back into those comfortable old habits to which they’re so accustomed.
3. Optimising performance across integrated channels. Intelligent Integrated Inbound
Finally, the transition is made, which means it’s time for a bit of good old-fashioned optimisation. One issue here though, is that even for an experienced marketer, making sense of all the data to maximise the return on investment from every last drop of marketing spend can be difficult.
Depending on the size of the company, investing in a data analyst to pore over the different marketing efforts in the various inbound channels is a move that will produce solid returns. Due to the instantaneous nature of some forms of inbound marketing, it’s likely you’ll see those returns pretty quickly, too.
Broadly speaking though, this is all about the scientific method. It’s about setting targets for each channel, measuring the results each day, each week, or whatever time period you deem appropriate and can commit to consistently, and then adjusting your methodology in an iterative fashion.
By measuring and then tweaking your strategies in this way, you’ll find your feet before you know it and start confidently striding towards those targets.
Conclusion:
Inbound and outbound marketing present their own different challenges. In order to produce a successful inbound marketing campaign, you might want to consider professionals that are experienced in both outbound and inbound marketing and have proven strategies that will work.
If you’re new to inbound marketing, there’s a lot to take on. And, if you’ve stuck with us through the terminology and strategy to the end of this two-part special, you should now begin to see the value in implementing a specific and regimented inbound marketing strategy.
Taking the leap into the world of inbound marketing with anything less than a solid blueprint will ultimately result in a colossal amount of wasted time and money.
Here are 5 Go To Market strategy examples to get you started, inbound marketing involves putting the information out where your consumers will find it, if you would like to learn how we can help you make that transition, get in touch today.
